Nietzsche: A Self-Portrait from His Letters

by Friedrich Nietzsche, Peter Fuss (Editor), Henry Shapiro (Editor)

Contents:
The Letters
A Chronological Sketch
Nietzsche's Major Works
The Correspondents
Bibliography
Index

Genres: Philosophy

204 pages, Hardcover

First published November 18, 1971

About the author

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German classical scholar, philosopher, and critic of culture, who became one of the most influential of all modern thinkers. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. He became the youngest person to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869 at the age of 24, but resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life; he completed much of his core writing in the following decade. In 1889, at age 44, he suffered a collapse and afterward a complete loss of his mental faculties, with paralysis and probably vascular dementia. He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897 and then with his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Nietzsche died in 1900, after experiencing pneumonia and multiple strokes.
Nietzsche's work spans philosophical polemics, poetry, cultural criticism, and fiction while displaying a fondness for aphorism and irony. Prominent elements of his philosophy include his radical critique of truth in favour of perspectivism; a genealogical critique of religion and Christian morality and a related theory of master–slave morality; the aesthetic affirmation of life in response to both the "death of God" and the profound crisis of nihilism; the notion of Apollonian and Dionysian forces; and a characterisation of the human subject as the expression of competing wills, collectively understood as the will to power. He also developed influential concepts such as the Übermensch and his doctrine of eternal return. In his later work, he became increasingly preoccupied with the creative powers of the individual to overcome cultural and moral mores in pursuit of new values and aesthetic health. His body of work touched a wide range of topics, including art, philology, history, music, religion, tragedy, culture, and science, and drew inspiration from Greek tragedy as well as figures such as Zoroaster, Arthur Schopenhauer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Wagner, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
After his death, Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth became the curator and editor of his manuscripts. She edited his unpublished writings to fit her German ultranationalist ideology, often contradicting or obfuscating Nietzsche's stated opinions, which were explicitly opposed to antisemitism and nationalism. Through her published editions, Nietzsche's work became associated with fascism and Nazism. 20th-century scholars such as Walter Kaufmann, R.J. Hollingdale, and Georges Bataille defended Nietzsche against this interpretation, and corrected editions of his writings were soon made available. Nietzsche's thought enjoyed renewed popularity in the 1960s and his ideas have since had a profound impact on 20th- and early 21st-century thinkers across philosophy—especially in schools of continental philosophy such as existentialism, postmodernism, and post-structuralism—as well as art, literature, music, poetry, politics, and popular culture.

Reviews

[Διόνυσος Ελευθέριος · Rating 5 out of 5]

Friedrich Nietzsche engaged in very rich correspondence over many years of his life, and given just how personal philosophy was for him, his letters can often lead his readers to important details that can augment our efforts in coming to understand him. Make no mistake, there are no substitutes for his published works, books which he took the greatest pains to prepare, but the letters can and often do add to his indispensable published works. However, as helpful as the letters can be, scholarship in the English-speaking world has not always been very helpful, for the vast majority of the letters remain untranslated to this day. And unless one's skills in German are good enough to read them as they were written, one risks missing out on very much.

Fortunately, a partial remedy comes in the form of this book, Peter Fuss and Henry Shapiro's Nietzsche: A Self-Portrait from His Letters. It is (as far as I know now) one of only two or three respectably-sized selections. A disadvantage of this selection, it seems to me, is the actual method of selection that Fuss and Shapiro use in their selecting: many of the letters they have selected to translate have been subjected to a further selection, being cropped and diced up, sometimes even in mid-letter, a device that no doubt saves space, but also does us a great disservice when we are trying to follow some fascinating train of thought that Nietzsche is revealing. Nevertheless, I find this book to be a great asset and highly recommend it. The translations are very good, and the scholarly apparatus quite excellent. After the letters, the book concludes with a detailed chronology of Nietzsche's life and publishing history, with the very helpful granularity of relating to us just which months of which years he was writing which books, and then which month in particular he finished them, and even exactly where he was at just those times. And furthermore, there is a very helpful section containing brief biographical sketches of all of Nietzsche's correspondents from this book, and some details about their respective relationships with him. As a whole the book is a wonderful asset to have.

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Incredibly, I don't own this book anymore. When I married in '84 there wasn't enough bookshelf space, so I took pretty much all of the paperbacks to the nice old lady who owned The Book Nook paperback exchange in Sawyer, Michigan and traded them in.

In any case, this, like Selected Letters, is a collection of some of Nietzsche's correspondence which I read for Dr. Seigfried's course on the philosopher at Loyola University Chicago during the first semester of 1982/83.

[Marcus · Rating 5 out of 5]

I find Nietzsche to be a very insightful philosopher, with the most concise prose style I have ever encountered. And yet, after reading these letters, in which his tone is at once grandiose and whimpering, it is more understandable as to why he was, even in a century of solitary bookworms, one of the loneliest of men.